IE is probably not significantly any more buggy than any other piece of complex software, Kandek said, but it gets the lion’s share of scrutiny from both security researchers and malicious hackers alike, given that it connects users to the online world.

It will be interesting to track how many flaws Microsoft’s new Edge browser will generate each month, once this IE replacement is released with Windows 10 later this year, Kandek said.

On the one hand, new software almost always has more bugs than software that has been tested and refined over time. But Microsoft may have also implemented more security conscious development practices in the 20 years since IE was first built.